Jeanne Theoharis. A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Beacon Press. Kindle Edition) [E]ven those civil rights heroes we recognize today were reviled in their day and made to feel crazy. Today’s lamentation—that we need another King—misses the fact that we have many
Read moreWhen the NYPD Rioted
(updated March 4, 2024 to include quotations from Black newspapers & December 6, 2024 to include a citation to a 2021 article in New York Magazine about the riot. ) In New York in 1992, about 10,000 off-duty police officers and their supporters protested and about 4,000 of them rioted
Read moreResisting Repression: Black Lives Movement in Context
The huge wave of protests against police violence that is happening this week has new features tied to the current moment, but is grounded in a movement that has been building for decades. Its direct ties to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014-2016 should be obvious, but that movement,
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Methods of Jail Data Collection and Rapid Turnover
Pamela Oliver, PhD in collaboration with Eric Howland Local activist groups such as Madison’s MOSES are concerned about reducing the number of people in jail. As part of this effort, activists use technology to automate the collection of public data to monitor local authorities. Eric Howland has been collecting data
Read moreDane County Jail Downsizing
Dane County Jail Downsizing: How was it accomplished and who was still in on May 9, 2020? Link to PDF version of this report Author: Pamela Oliver, analyzing data collected by Eric Howland. Data source: Scraping daily web reports of Dane County Jail. In custody status as of 6:30 a.m.
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Why are People in the Dane County Jail?
December 2019 This report is my summary of the August 2019 “Analysis of the Dane County Jail Population” written by James Austin, Roger Ocker, and Wendy Naro-Ware of the JFA Institute (note1). The JFA report concludes that the best way to reduce the jail population is to speed the processing
Read moreLong-term prisoners
There is a great deal of discussion about the best ways to reduce mass incarceration. One topic that has received significant attention is the need to revisit parole for people who have been incarcerated for a long time. Some argue on moral grounds, that there should always be hope, and
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Black Men and the Politics of Redemption
This is a long review of a book I highly recommend, Nikki Jones‘s The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption University of California Press (2018) so let me begin by highlighting the material that struck me most vividly. This is the first piece I have read that
Read moreBlack Strike at UW Madison 1969
In February of 1969, Black students and their White allies at the University of Wisconsin Madison called a strike and blocked entrances to campus buildings to back up their demands. I agreed to be part of a panel June 16 on the Black Student Strike of 1969 at UW Madison.
Read moreAmerican Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race
Angel Adams Parham’s book American Routes: Racial Palimpsests and the Transformation of Race (Oxford, 2017, available in hardcover and as an ebook from many vendors) is an exciting work that makes a novel and important contribution to our understanding of race in the US. The “racial palimpsest” idea is that
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